Annoying. Its worst when you are a co-worker of people who come to work, but don't want to work. Some stores have a policy that if a customer is within a few feet of you, you need to approach them, greet them, offer them any help, etc. Retail can be a pain though, for customer and employee alike.

You should have yelled to them, "ay' yo! one of you want to earn your paycheck?"

Macy's DRILLS and DRILLS customer service and approaching customers. Macy's trains and retrains and follows up with even more training. Managers have meetings with their associates to go over their performance, and that includes approaching customers and helping them out. There's even a goal that every store must reach regarding helping/approaching customers.

Naturally, not every associate follows this to a tee 100% of the time, but does anybody do their job 100% properly 100% of the time?

When I was working retail at Abercrombie and Fitch, the manager actually told us to stand around pretending to be busy if we had nothing to do, and only help the customers if they came up and asked. This was some bizarre company policy to try to give retail associates (who at abercrombie and fitch are called 'models' ) an air of mystique.

They told us the way to greet was 'hey' or 'sup'. Not 'Hi' 'hello' or 'how can i help you'

We were only instructed to approach people we were suspicious of shoplifting.

Pretty retarded if you ask me. I hope people stop buying those clothes soon.